Anniversary of the 1937 US sit-down strike wave: Remembering another Occupy movement

January 3, 2012 – Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The year 2012 marks the 75th
anniversary of the great sit-down strike wave of 1937. It also begins the
second year of the Occupy movement, which has more than a few similarities to
the time when hundreds of thousands of Americans occupied their workplaces.

The first
recorded sit-down strike in the US was actually in 1906 among General Electric
workers of Schenectady, New York. When three organisers for the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies) were fired, 3000 of their fellow workers
sat down and stopped production.

By the
1930s, the IWW was on the wane, but many of its organisers were active and
workers across the US had seen its tactics first hand.

In 1933,
workers in the Austin, Minnesota, Hormel plant had many complaints against the
company: raises habitually went to foremen’s friends; workers were fired and
then rehired in other departments at lower pay; before election day, foremen
would threaten layoffs if Farmer-Labor Party candidates won, and employees who
challenged the practices were told that they could quit. The final straw came
when Jay Hormel, who fancied himself to be a “benevolent dictator”, attempted
to impose a weekly pay deduction for an insurance plan.

When a worker
in Hog Kill was pressured to sign up, other workers shut down the floor for 10
minutes, until his insurance card was torn up. News of the brief sit down
spread throughout the plant. That July night, workers met at Austin’s Sutton
Park to form a union.

The union
charter followed the IWW pattern of grouping all workers into one big union
regardless of craft. It invited membership from labourers throughout Austin and
the surrounding area. The workers named themselves the Independent Union of All
Workers (IUAW).

Jay Hormel
promised to recognise the union, grant seniority rights and arbitrate
grievances. But for six weeks, Hormel refused to put anything in writing and on
November 10 workers voted to strike. The Farmer-Laborite Minnesota governor made
public speeches backing the strikers while he secretly mobilised the National Guard
30 miles from Austin.

Support
for the strike was overwhelming. Since the IUAW had endorsed farmers’ efforts
to raise their prices, the Farmers’ Holiday Association patrolled roads leading
into Austin to halt livestock and scabs. Strikers occupied the plant and, as
Stan Weir recounted the story,

food, bedding, cigarettes, reading material and playing
cards were brought to them by family and friends. They came out of the plant
several days later with one of the first industrial union contracts in mass
production history.

Great Goodyear
Strike

The
best-known early sit-down strikes were in Ohio. Jeremy Brecher described their
humble beginnings in his book, Strike!
Sometime in the early 1930s, two factory baseball teams in Akron, Ohio,
objected to the umpire because he was not in the union. They stopped playing
and sat in the field until a new umpire was found.

A few days
later, a supervisor at a rubber factory insulted several workers. Remembering
the ball game, they turned off their machines and sat at their work benches. The
work stoppage spread throughout the plant and, in less than an hour, the
company had given in. Between 1933 and 1936, the practice of sit-down strikes
grew among Akron rubber workers.

In January
1936, Firestone announced a rate reduction and fired a union committee member. Workers
in one area after another halted production and sat down. The company gave in
on both issues. The Great Goodyear Strike began in February 1936 when 700 workers
were laid off.

Though
hundreds of workers held a sit-down, officers from the United Rubber Workers
(URW) persuaded them to leave. Goodyear, US President Franklin Roosevelt and
URW officials all tried to convince them to return to work and submit their
grievances to arbitration. Instead, the Goodyear workers held out for a month
and won. Since union recognition had not been established, the rubber workers enforced
the agreement by dozens of sit-down strikes during the rest of 1936.

Flint,
Michigan

During the
early 1930s, resentment over speed-up and lack of freedom at work was rampant
among auto workers. Sit-down strikes at Fisher Body Plants in Cleveland and
Detroit caught the owners totally unprepared. When two welders were laid off at
a plant in Flint, Michigan, the sit downers were so unified that Fisher
management persuaded cops to drive all over town to tell the welders that they
got their jobs back so other workers would start production again.

On
December 30, 1936, workers at Fisher Body No. 1 in Flint discovered that the
company was stockpiling dies (to outlast an expected strike) and occupied the
plant. For several weeks, they governed themselves in their own committees that
were a model of democracy unknown in the official union structure. When cops
tried to stop supporters from bringing food into the plant, a fight of several
hours resulted in the strikers chasing them off.

On January
11, 1937, the liberal New Deal state governor ordered the National Guard into
Flint. Thousands of industrial unionists poured into Flint to protect the sit downers
by preventing the “friend of labour” politician from using the National Guard. This
began the great wave of 1937 sit-down strikes.

By the
time General Motors signed its first contract with the United Auto Workers
(UAW), nearly 50,000 workers had just been involved in strikes inside their plants. There were 60
sit-down strikes in Chicago in March 1937 alone. The 1800 blue-collar and white-collar
workers who sat down together at the Chicago Mail Order Co. won a 10% pay
increase. And the 450 waitresses and other employees who sat at the tables of
Chicago’s three large de Met’s Tea Room won a 25% wage hike.

When the
mayor of Amsterdam, New York, tried to hire a private firm to replace garbage
men who were sitting at their trucks, the strikers convinced their
“replacements” not to scab. Women at a Philadelphia hosiery mill halted the
movement of machinery by sitting down.

In
Milwaukee, the manager of Yahr Lange Drug Co. had the nasty habit of firing
workers when their seniority earned them a raise. So, they sat down and radioed
salespeople, who pulled their cars over and sat in them until the manager had
been removed. There were thousands of strikes varying from a handful of workers
to massive organising efforts. Altogether, these strikes involved close to half
a million workers sitting down at their jobs.

The tactic
made famous by rubber and auto workers was especially popular in Detroit. Employees
at the Newton Packing Co. and Durable Laundry occupied their workplaces. Clerks
sat down at Crowley-Milner and Frand & Cedar Department Stores. And, there
were sit-down strikes at hotels, lumberyards, tobacco plants and electrical
factories. Drivers on Chicago freight
subways sat down when their employer announced layoffs.

Sit-down
strikes included furniture workers in St. Louis, shirt company employees in
Pulaski, Tennessee, leather workers in Girard, Ohio, broom manufacturing
workers in Pueblo, Colorado, and oil workers in Seminole, Oklahoma. Department
stores were particularly prone to sit-down strikes because employees could be
replaced so easily in regular strikes. In Pittsburgh, C.G. Murphy store
employees had a “folded arms” strike when they found no chairs available for a
sit down.

Sit-down
strikes were successful even though unions had just been decimated by the Great
Depression. They often occurred in shops where unions were weak. Workers at
Yahr Lange Drug Co. had rejected unionisation shortly before their sit-down
strike. In 1934, union membership among Flint auto workers was only 528. The
137 tyre builders who began the Great Goodyear Strike of 1936 with their
sit-down strike included hardly any member of the rubber workers’ union.

In fact,
sit-down strikes sometimes occurred because
people distrusted union officials. Workers were frequently angry at delays in
grievance procedures and the lack of attention to workplace demands. Since
sit-down strikes are direct action by the people who see an injustice, there is
no one to sell out the agreement. With a sit-down strike, workers do not go
back to work until people are rehired, the workload is reduced to a human pace,
dangerous chemicals are removed, sexual discrimination is stopped or wages are
restored.

“Normal”
strikes involve unions’ giving management weeks or months of advance notice,
which allows the company time to stockpile goods or otherwise prepare to defeat
the strike. But both management and union leaders are caught unprepared by
sit-down strikes. Management must respond quickly because the action brings
production to a grinding halt. Workers then have tremendous leverage. Since
they are occupying their place of work, it is extremely difficult for
management to find scabs to replace sit-downers.

Illegal?

If you ask
“Why did sit-down strikes come to a halt in the US?” you may hear that it was because
a Supreme Court ruling made them illegal. Though on February 27, 1939, the court
ruled that sit-down strikes violated property owner rights, the ruling had
little to do with their decline. For centuries, merely being in a union and
taking any job action was illegal. If
unions had never been willing to do anything illegal, they never would have
come into existence.

As Brecher
observes in Strike!, court
injunctions were used repeatedly against sit downers during 1937. In other
words, sit-down strikes were already illegal when they happened. And labour actions
since the great sit-down strike wave have been won, despite being “illegal”. The
most notable is the postal wildcat strike of March 1970. Though striking
against the government is a felony which can result in a year in jail, more
than 200,000 postal workers in 15 US states joined strikers in New York City. Their
action forced US Congress to grant them a 24% wage increase.

It was
repeated hostility by union officials that threw ice water on the sit-down
movement. Union officials tend to want arbitration and negotiated settlements,
which give them a place at the table without taking personal risks. Throughout
1937, many union officials urged workers not to sit down or to end strikes
after they began. After 1937, collaboration between employers and union
higher-ups increased.

Civil
rights movement, 1960s

Nevertheless,
the idea of sitting down has inspired generations of activists for three
quarters of a century. Beginning in the late 1950s, civil rights marchers
recalled the labour tactic as they held sit-ins against racism at lunch
counters throughout the South. During the height of US attacks on Vietnam in
the late 1960s, hundreds of thousands of students sat-in at administration
offices to protest their universities’ complicity with militarism. By the late
1970s, hardly a month went by without a sit-in to call attention to the destructive
effects of nuclear power or other ecological catastrophes.

The labour
movement has not forgotten the tactic. During the 1968 upheavals in France,
many workers struck by occupying their workplaces. In the first decade of the
21st century, there have been worker occupations in Canada, South Africa,
England, France, Spain and Turkey. The most intense have been in Argentina.

With the
financial crisis of 2001, one business after another looked like it would close
and workers responded by taking over many. Moreover, they kept the companies
running. According to Marie Trigona, 250 worker-occupied enterprises have
employed more than 13,000 people. This has led Argentina to have some of the
lengthiest recent experiences of worker management. Trigona believes that “the
recuperated enterprises confirm that businesses don’t need bosses to produce”. For
example, at the Zanon ceramics factory, workers hold general assemblies to make
decisions about production.

The recent
sit-down occupation best-known to Americans was at Republic Windows and Doors
in December 2008. With construction business down, the Chicago company gave its
more than 200 workers three days to clear out. Instead, the members of UE Local
1100 took over the plant and groups of 30 kept it occupied so management could
not move out its expensive machinery. After six days, they won.

Occupy
Wall Street can trace itself to a great tradition which began in the US, spread
across the globe in one movement after another, and returned to the US in 2011,
only to go global again. When people sit down at work, at a lunch counter, at
school or in a park, they realise that they themselves have the power to collectively
take back control of their lives from the 1%.

[Don Fitz is on the coordinating committee of the Greens/Green Party USA
and produces Green Time TV in St. Louis, Missouri. He can be reached at
fitzdon@aol.com.]

Comments

“They were the big wheel here. They had the judges behind them,
they had the mayor behind them, and the little man had no chance.”

−Female factory worker1

In the last wintry days of 1936, disgruntled GM workers across the country
halted their assembly lines, put down their tools, and began one of the
most important events in American labor history: the Great GM Sit-down
Strike. The workers’ action, or rather lack of action, caused GM,
as well as the Steel, Electrical, and Textile industries, to recognize
the power of their employees.

Until that time workers were treated like expendable cogs in the production
process. They were under-paid, nearly crippled by the dizzying speed of
production lines, laid off with no income or financial support for the
three to five months between model years, and could be fired at the whim
of their managers even for suspicion of being involved in union activity.
As some workers used to put it, “once you pass the gates of General
Motors forget about the United States Constitution.”2 The workers
had been pushed down onto their knees in GM’s drive for faster production
and greater profits, but they found a way to stand up for themselves: by
sitting down.

At the center of the sit-down strike was Flint, Mich, where “most
of the bodies for all GM cars, and all the engines for [GM’s] biggest
money-maker, Chevrolet, were manufactured.”3 The
United Auto Workers (UAW) Union leaders knew that if a strike were to succeed
it would have to begin there, at the heart of GM’s production line. Flint
was also a company town. “Eighty
percent of the population of 150,000 were directly dependent on GM for livelihood.”4 Victory
in a town like Flint would prove that workers had the desire and the strength
to unionize.

Taking The Plant

GM knew a storm was on the horizon. Discontent, in the form
of small strikes, had been rippling throughout their factories, but these
strikes were easily put down because of poor planning, weak local unions,
and the efforts of labor spies. GM feared that the tide of strikes would
spread to Flint, where the union was growing stronger, so on December 30,
1936, the company began moving manufacturing tools out of Flint’s
Fisher No. 1, “in
an open attempt to shift production to a plant where the union was weak.”6

When
word of this reached Robert Travis, head of the UAW in Flint, he called
an emergency meeting at the union hall across the street from the plant.
There, union members voted to shut production down immediately and the
Great Sit-down Strike began.

Workers flooded out of the union hall, ran
for the plant and set to work securing it. This scene is best described
by Walter Linder in his Progressive Labor Party pamphlet, “The
Great Flint Sit-Down Strike Against GM 1936-37.”

“They moved
scores of unfinished Buick bodies in front of all the entrances to form
a gigantic barricade. With acetylene torches, they welded a steel frame
around every door. Bullet-proof metal sheets were put into position to
cover every window, while holes were carved in them and threaded to allow
the nozzles of fire hoses to be screwed into them. Wet clothes were kept
in readiness to be placed on the face as protection against tear-gas attacks.
Large supplies of metal parts were placed in strategic spots. Paint guns
for spraying would-be invaders were located throughout the plant.”7

Men
who had been separated and compartmentalized by the noise and restrictions
of the assembly line were now working together not only to secure the
plant from outside aggressors, but also to organize themselves into a
community that could function and sustain itself within the plant.

GM officials
knew they were in trouble; their normal strike-breaking tactics wouldn’t
work against the sit-down. The company couldn’t easily
stop the strike with violence. Instead of being outside of the factory
in a picket line where they would be vulnerable to attack, the workers
were protected by the company’s own walls. GM couldn’t
hire scabs, who were often used to continue production and crush strikers’ morale,
because the strikers were guarding their idle machines, holding them
hostage. Trying to forcefully remove the workers would put at risk “millions
of dollars of company property, vast assembly lines and unfinished
products.”8 The
workers were digging in deep and preparing to hold on tight.

A Well-Structured Strike

“We wasn’t individuals any longer; we were part of an organization.”

−Female worker at GM’s A.C. Spark Plug9

The sit-down strike had something else GM feared: organization.
Once the plant was secure, and female employees were sent to the union
hall to avoid accusations of scandal, the nearly 3,000 men settled in and
made the plant their temporary home. To maintain order, the strikers held
daily meetings and voted on a committee of fourteen members to act as a “little
government.”10 All of the
committee’s rules and actions had to
be approved by democratic vote. The committee organized the men into sub-committees
which controlled “food, police, information, sanitation and health,
safety, ‘kangaroo court,’ entertainment, education and athletics.”11

While
the police committee was probably the most important, patrolling the
plant in rotating shifts twenty-four hours a day to insure against spies
and strikebreakers, the entertainment committee provided a much-needed
break from the monotony of the strike. One of the entertainment highlights
was Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times, which Roger Ebert
describes as, “a fable about (among other things) automation, assembly
lines and the enslaving of man by machines.”12 Chaplin
donated prints of the film and a local theater owner set up screenings
in the plant. The themes of Modern Times and some of Chaplin’s other
films later prompted the House Un-American Activities Committee to accuse
Chaplin of being a communist, though he denied the charge.13

The workers also put
rules in place to keep themselves morally upright. Smoking was only allowed
in certain areas of the plant. Liquor and gambling were banned. They
prided themselves on clean living; the plant was tidied up every day
at 3p.m., and every man was encouraged to shower once a day.14 If a worker
broke the law in the plant, he was tried by his fellow strikers in the
kangaroo court. Any man who was convicted three times would be sent home.15

Because
of the organization and commitment of the men inside, Fisher No. 1 and
a smaller sit-down in Flint’s other body plant, Fisher No. 2, the
strike quickly spread to plants across the country and GM’s production
of auto bodies halted. By January 1, just two days after the strike began,
every Chevrolet and Buick assembly plant had closed.

On January 2, 1937,
Homer Martin, president of the national UAW, called Janesville, Wisconsin’s
union presidents — Wesley Van Horn
of local 95 and Elmer Yenney of local 121 — to a meeting in
Flint. As a result of that meeting, workers at Janesville’s
Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants joined in the sit-down strike on
January 5, 1937.16

The strikes in Janesville and other cities such
as Cleveland, Atlanta, Norwood and Kansas City were important strategically
for the UAW, who wanted to expand the strike outside of Flint to
push for a “national rather
than local settlement.”17 “By January 7, 100,000 GM workers
were idle.”18

While the UAW expanded their strike, they found
another way to hurt GM: they aided the company’s competitors.
UAW leaders helped end a strike at Bohn Aluminum, “to ensure
the uninterrupted flow of pistons to the Ford Motor Company.”19 They
also helped negotiate settlements of strikes at Pittsburgh Plate
Glass and Libby-Owens-Ford so Chrysler could continue producing.20

The
UAW and their strikers vowed to continue the fight against GM until
their demands for “union recognition and a national contract,
a shorter work week, seniority rights, minimum pay rates and an end
to speed-ups” were
met.21

Janesville Joins the Strike

“My God, My God, they are all union!”

−Janesville’s Fisher body plant manager22

When men at Janesville’s Fisher Body put down their tools and refused
to go back to work, the plant manager, who was passionately anti-union
but greatly out-numbered, did the only thing he could think of to stop
the strike: he tried to pick up Elmer Yenney, president of local 121, and
carry him out of the building.

After his attempt failed, the plant manager asked Yenney what he should
do and Yenney replied, “I don’t give a damn what you do, but
we’re staying here.”23

Union officers signed up new members and
sent workers to the plant’s cafeteria to organize and prepare for
the strike. In the cafeteria, union men made speeches and promised the
strikers they would get the necessities: food and cigarettes.

But the sit-down tactic wouldn’t last long in
Janesville. Thanks to the negotiations of City Manager Henry
Traxler,
workers only remained in the plants for nine hours and fifteen minutes.
Traxler mediated a conference between Van Horn and Yenney, GM officials
and local law enforcement to come to an agreement on evacuating the plants.
Traxler and Janesville’s local newspaper were later praised for
their neutrality during the strike.24

After Van Horn and Yenney talked
with a representative from the UAW’s international office and
put a vote to the workers in both plants, it was decided that the sit-down
strikers would leave the Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants as long as
they remained closed for the duration of the national GM strike and
no equipment or stock was moved out of Janesville.25 GM sympathizers would
soon try to break this truce.

Sabotage!

“Espionage is the most efficient method known to management to prevent
unions from forming, to weaken them if they secure a foothold and to wreck
them when they try their strength.”

−Findings of the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee26

While the union gained support and membership at the beginning
of the sit-down strike, GM was plotting to retake and re-open their empire.
One way they fought the strike was with labor spies. GM had employed the
Pinkerton Detective Agency to spy on its workers for years. Plant managers
even went as far as hiring lip readers to see if workers were discussing
unionization along the noisy assembly lines.27 The La Follette Committee, a government
body established to investigate tactics employers used to avoid collective
bargaining, called the dealings between the Pinkerton Agency and GM, “the
most colossal super-system of spies yet devised in any American corporation.”28 There
were at least two Pinkerton agents among the sit-down strikers in Flint,
who Robert Travis believed may have spread rumors to hurt morale and fed
damaging information to anti-union reporters.29

The Pinkertons and other GM
loyalists caused trouble outside the plant as well by targeting strikers’ families.
Flint’s GM-controlled
media reported that even if strikers made it home alive they would not
only lose their jobs but would also be blacklisted from the auto industry.
Anonymous letters were sent to strikers saying their wives were cheating
on them and wives received letters saying their husbands were deathly
ill.30 GM loyalists also
spread rumors that prostitutes were going to the plants to entertain
the men. Agents even managed to disguise a prostitute and sneak her into
one of the plants, but she was quickly discovered and sent home.31 Other agents preyed on workers’ children, questioning
them at school “to gain information about the strikers and weaken
their morale.”32 These attacks on the home front prompted many wives
to go to the factories and beg their husbands to give up the strike.

GM
loyalists used more violent means of persuasion on union members who
were coordinating the strike from outside the plants. A group known as
the Black Legion. with strong ties to the KKK, threatened and terrorized
union members. The Flint Alliance, which was mostly made up of GM supervisors
and hired strikebreakers, was also formed. They called themselves “loyal
GM workers who were laid off in other plants because of the Fisher Body
strike and who were demanding an end to ‘minority rule.”33 ’’ Supervisors
went to plants that weren’t on strike and forced workers to sign
membership cards for the Flint Alliance. Workers who refused to join
the new “union” were
often physically assaulted.34

In Janesville, Plant Manager Fitzpatrick began
violating the terms of the factory evacuations by allowing the Parts
and Service divisions to operate and by removing loaded train cars
from the plants. An anti-union group also formed and rented a meeting hall
right next to the union headquarters, but when 250 UAW members confronted
the anti-union group, they found only twenty men at anti-union headquarters,
all of whom agreed to leave together and gave up on their meetings.35

While
many of these small attempts to scare workers and their families away
from the union were effective, GM was planning a large-scale attack to
starve and freeze the sit-down strikers out of the factories and re-start
their production lines.

The Battle of Bulls Run

“We were fighting for dignity. I don’t really remember fighting
for more money, it was to be treated like human beings, because we were
not treated like human beings.”

−Female factory worker36

With financial losses mounting, GM tried to provoke the sit-down strikers
to violence. The company wanted to destroy the peaceful image of the sit-down
strikers and portray them as a destructive mob so that Governor Murphy
would have no choice but to declare martial law and use the National Guard
to break up the strike.37

The battle that GM manufactured was fought between
union supporters and GM company police over Flint’s Fisher Body
No. 2, a plant not strongly held by strikers. Before the battle, only about
100 strikers occupied the plant and they only had control of the second
floor. Company police controlled the rest of the building, but so far
in the strike no major conflicts had occurred.

Then, a little after noon
on January 11, 1937, with the temperature outside barely above zero,
GM shut off the heat in Fisher No. 2 and a group of company police armed
with clubs removed a ladder, which was the strikers’ main means of
exit from the plant.38 Cold and worried strikers sent word to union headquarters
that more picketers were needed.

Later that night, union members who
tried to bring the strikers their dinner were turned away by company
police at the plant gates. The strikers sent a committee of about 30 men
to demand the gates be opened and when the company police refused, the
committee forced the gate open.39 While strikers and picketers celebrated
their small victory, the company police called Flint’s police and
said that they were being kidnapped and then locked themselves in Fisher
No. 2’s women’s bathroom.

Flint police, armed with “revolvers,
gas guns, grenades, and supplies of tear and nauseating gas,” surrounded
the factory and blockaded the streets so quickly that many believed the
events leading up to the battle had been planned in advance by GM.40 The
UAW sent more picketers to aid in the battle. Women dropped their children
off at union headquarters and rushed to fight with their men at the plant.41
Union members even managed to get their sound car — a car equipped
with a battery-powered public address system — to
the plant to help encourage the strikers and direct their counterattacks.

The battle began at Fisher No. 2’s gate when police attacked the
strike committee guarding the entrance. Then police threw gas bombs into
the crowd of picketers surrounding Fisher No. 2, but the wind blew the
tear gas back in the officers’ faces. Strikers and picketers began
throwing spare car parts, empty milk bottles, and chunks of ice, pavement,
and coal at the police.42 Workers pushed fire hoses through the factory
windows and sprayed the police with water. Some officers managed to throw
gas bombs in the windows, but workers extinguished the bombs in water
buckets they’d kept at the ready.43

When the police tried to retreat
they were followed by strikers and picketers, who continued throwing
everything they could at them. At this point, the police turned, and “drew
pistols and riot guns, and fired into the ranks of their pursuers.”44

Fourteen union members and supporters were wounded in the
battle, 13 of them by gunshot. The sheriff of Flint, a deputy sheriff and
nine officers were wounded as well. But after the injured were carried
away and the tear gas cleared, the strikers still controlled Fisher No.
2 and the police, or “bulls” as they were called at that time,
had run away from the fight.46

Instead of discrediting the union and ending
the strike, the Battle of Bulls Run actually boosted union membership
and support. The day after the battle, men and women from Michigan and
the surrounding states converged on Flint. “Eight
thousand workers massed in front of Fisher No. 2 to celebrate the victory.”47

This
victory also changed the way women participated in the strike effort. Before
the battle women were mostly involved in preparing meals for the strikers,
but at Bulls Run Genora Johnson, the 23-year-old wife of a striker, noticed
how many other wives and mothers, and daughters came to fight alongside their
men. As a result, she created the Women’s Emergency Brigade.

At their
first meeting, Genora Johnson told would-be members of the brigade, “Expect
to face tear gas and bullets on the picket lines, possibly be beaten and
killed by police attacks and attempts to break the strike. There is no
room in the brigade for squeamish and hysterical women. You will have
to remain strong even when your sister falls by your side.”48

The
Women’s Emergency Brigade with the help of the UAW’s Women’s
Auxiliary, collected money for strikers’ families, visited strike
widows to improve their morale, organized classes for women on the history
of the labor movement and provided childcare for mothers who were busy
with union duties such as maintaining picket lines day and night in front
of the striking factories.49 Genora
Johnson also organized a children’s
picket line. Workers’ children
marched through the streets of Flint carrying signs with messages like, “Our
Daddies Fight For Us Little Tykes.”50 The
children’s picket received
international press coverage.

The Brigade also gave female factory workers,
who were not allowed to stay in the striking factories, a chance to take
a more active role in the fight. These women had endured the same physical
and mental abuse as male workers, but many them were sexually abused
as well. In Lorraine Gray’s film,
With Babies and Banners, female factory workers said that the girls who
kept their jobs were the girls who let the foremen touch them. At Flint’s
AC Spark Plug factory, where many of GM’s female workers were employed,
one whole department of women was “forced to go to the county hospital
and be treated for a venereal disease traced to one foreman.”51 The
brigade offered these women a way to regain their dignity.

The Women’s
Emergency Brigade was organized along military lines and was ready
to fight at a moment’s notice. Women with phones and cars were made
captains so they could round up their female troops and transport them
to battle. Brigade members began wearing red berets and arming themselves
with two-by-fours that were whittled down at one end so they could
be carried easily and swung like clubs.

The Women’s Emergency Brigade
also countered GM’s claims that strikers were selfish and lazy.
The women’s active role in supporting the sit-downers showed a strong
bond between union men and their families.

Bait and Switch

On January 13, 1937, Michigan’s Gov. Murphy called
UAW and GM leaders together for a conference. As a result, GM agreed to
a truce. The company claimed they would negotiate with the UAW as the sole
bargaining unit if strikers would evacuate the factories, but even as workers
prepared to return home, GM was writing a press release stating that the
company was going to discuss representation and union recognition with
the Flint Alliance.54
A United Press reporter found the release and showed it to UAW leaders
for comment. The UAW responded by calling off the plant evacuations immediately.

When the ruse failed, GM stepped up its efforts to stop the strike in
the courts. The company had already attempted an injunction against the
sit-downers early in the strike, which had been thrown out because Judge
Edward D. Black, who ordered the injunction, was discovered to be a major
GM stockholder. Now the company found a judge who didn’t own GM stock
and filed for another injunction to evacuate the factories and stop the
picketing, claiming that the strike was causing them to lose money to their
competitors.

Politicians in Michigan also attacked the legality of the
strike, sponsoring a bill to make sit-down strikes against the law.55 These
mounting tensions caused Gov. Murphy to move National Guard troops into
Flint but he tried to remain neutral saying the troops were there to
protect against violence from the strikers as well as GM loyalists.56

GM
began re-opening plants that it had closed across the country at the
beginning of the strike, and although they could only make and stockpile
parts instead of assembling cars, the move caused serious damage to the
union’s morale. Robert Travis and other union organizers in Flint
knew they had to strike another blow against GM. They began planning a
bait-and-switch operation of their own.

The union’s real target was “the
largest single unit of the GM empire,” Flint’s Chevy No.
4 plant, which had remained open and productive during the first month
of the strike.57 But the plant was heavily guarded and few of its
14,000 workers were union members. The strikers would have to draw GM’s
company police and loyalists away from Chevy No. 4. To achieve this,
Travis spread the word that another strike was coming. Then, in a series
of secret meetings in darkened rooms, he revealed to “trusted” union
men that the strike would take place at Chevy No. 9.

Travis actually
revealed the plan to strike at Chevy No. 9 to men he suspected to be
GM informants in order to use GM’s own spy network against them.
And his plan worked; GM took the bait. Soon after the secret meetings,
GM officials shifted security forces from Chevy No. 4 to Chevy No. 9.

On February 1 at 3:20 m., unionists in Chevy No. 9 began their sit-down.
They were quickly met by GM loyalists, company police and city police
armed with clubs and tear gas. Robert Travis headed to Chevy No. 9
with between three to four hundred union sympathizers and about 50
Women’s Emergency
Brigade members armed with their two-by-fours to support the strikers.58
Brigade members marched into the cloud of tear gas surrounding
the plant and began smashing windows so the men inside could breathe.
A woman later described the scene saying, “we have been gassed
before and we went right on.”59

The battle at Chevy No. 9 only lasted
about an hour but it gave union members in Chevy No. 4 enough time to
start the real sit-down strike. Travis and his followers dispersed and
regrouped at Chevy No. 4 along with union men from nearby Chevy No. 6
and the union sound car. Strikers inside had already shut down the assembly
lines and were clearing out anyone who didn’t want to participate
in the strike. Many workers who chose not to strike left their
lunches for the men who stayed. Outside, Genora Johnson announced
from the sound car that the Women’s Emergency Brigade would
arrive as soon as they wiped the tear gas out of their eyes.60

Soon hundreds of
Brigade members in their red berets marched to Chevy No. 4 singing “Hold
the Fort for We are Coming.” The women locked
arms and formed a revolving picket line around the plant and no
one was allowed in or out. The workers had taken Chevy No. 4.

Aftermath

“We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, for
the union makes us strong.”

-Lyrics to “Solidarity Forever”61

The union victory at Chevy No. 4 turned the tide of the strike and on
February 4, GM resumed negotiations with the UAW. This time GM did not
demand an evacuation of their factories, but the strikers didn’t
trust the company or the National Guard troops still stationed in Flint.
Many of the men inside the plants signed up for the fight-to-the-death
committee. They wrote a letter to Gov. Murphy saying that if he allowed
GM to use National Guard troops to invade the plants, several of the unarmed
strikers would be killed and their blood would be on the Governor’s
hands.62

On February 11, with profits still falling and thousands of workers
vowing to fight to the death, GM agreed to sign a contract with the UAW.
GM would end discrimination against union members and rehire all the
members who had been laid-off. Workers were also given a five cent an hour
raise and would be allowed to wear union buttons to work. GM also agreed
to begin negotiations on working conditions and wages.63

After 44 days, the
Great Sit-Down Strike was over. The sit-downers evacuated the plants
at 5 m. on February 11, 1937. They reunited with their families and paraded
through the streets of Flint like a victorious army.

The success of the
sit-down prompted industrial workers across the country to begin their
own strikes. Packard, Goodyear, Goodrich and General Electric all immediately
increased their workers’ wages. Chrysler also raised wages and
signed a contract with the UAW for its workers.64

Perhaps one of the biggest
victories came about without a strike. United States Steel, a company
who had been violently battling union organizers for years, signed a contract
with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. America’s working
class had won their rights, their wages and their dignity.

Solidarity Forever?

“We will continue to win only if we remember that through solidarity
we have been made free.”

-John Thrasher, sit-down striker66

Today General Motors is still one of the largest employers
in Janesville, Wis. GM’s Janesville plant is the largest plant under
one roof in the United States. The plant’s 3,900 employees manufacture
GM’s Suburban/Tahoe line.67 However,
during the 1980’s and ’90s,
while they were making record-breaking profits, General Motors closed nearly
all of its plants in Flint, Mich., a move that has cost the company town
nearly 80,000 jobs. These lay-offs plunged Flint into a financial depression
that led to the town’s bankruptcy.68

When GM announced they would close
Flint’s Fisher No. 1 plant, where the sit-down strike began, the
UAW promised massive demonstrations. But on the day of the plant closing
only four workers showed up to protest. They had one sign with one simple
message — a question mark. The plant closed
two weeks before Christmas in 1988.69

During the making of Roger and Me, Michael
Moore’s documentary about
how the lay-offs were affecting his hometown, Moore interviewed Owen Bieber,
then-president of the UAW, asking him, “Do you think we need another
sit-down strike?” Bieber responded, “A sit-down strike today would
not necessarily resemble or be able to bring about the same thing that it did
in 1937.” Moore later asked the same question to James Blanchard, then-Governor
of Michigan, who simply said, “I don’t know that that will do any
good.”

[Gillian
King is a researcher and production assistant for WPT’s History Unit.
She has a BA in Film Production and an MFA in Creative Writing from
Southern Illinois University and has written, produced, and directed
several short films, including Desmond! and Little Muddy Film Festival Winner Virginia
Versus the Martians, with her independent production company Johnny Hustle Ltd.]